Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Video IM, Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and various bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 19 December 2008, 9:43 AM
openSuSE 11.1 Released
The openSuSE Project made their 11.1 release available yesterday. I have downloaded and installed it on both of my laptops, and it looks very good. At least for the specific hardware and environment that I use, it is a significant improvement over the 11.0 release.
It is available for download as a Live CD with either the Gnome or KDE desktop, an install DVD, or even as a mini-CD download to support a network install. Of course it can also be purchased as a packaged distribution. I downloaded the Live CD Gnome version. Considering that I was getting it on the first day of release, their download servers help up quite well.
Installation was smooth and easy on both of my laptops - meaning that it didn't have any problems with the Lifebook S2110 and its ATI display driver. They have created a new graphical installation procedure, which I find very nice.
This release includes an updated Linux kernel (of course), Gnome 2.24 and KDE 4.1.3 (KDE 3.5.10 is also included), OpenOffice.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0.4, and a lot more - 230 new features, according to the openSUSE News!
For my own use, I was pleased to find that Adobe Flash is included in the Live CD distribution, Sun Java, Mozilla Thunderbird and Opera could be easily installed through the YaST software manager, and Gizmo5 was easy to download and install.
I obviously haven't had the time to test this release very much yet, but I will be doing so starting now. Based on what I have seen so far, I am quite impressed with this release.
One other thing... when I got to the office this morning, and booted the S6510 (which I had installed openSuSE on last night), instead of the usual green startup screen I got a very cute little winter scene, with penguins running around the edges of the GRUB boot menu. I have since rebooted a couple of times, and didn't get that GRUB menu again. Odd, interesting, amusing... it will be fun to see where that is coming from.
jw 19/12/2008
It is available for download as a Live CD with either the Gnome or KDE desktop, an install DVD, or even as a mini-CD download to support a network install. Of course it can also be purchased as a packaged distribution. I downloaded the Live CD Gnome version. Considering that I was getting it on the first day of release, their download servers help up quite well.
Installation was smooth and easy on both of my laptops - meaning that it didn't have any problems with the Lifebook S2110 and its ATI display driver. They have created a new graphical installation procedure, which I find very nice.
This release includes an updated Linux kernel (of course), Gnome 2.24 and KDE 4.1.3 (KDE 3.5.10 is also included), OpenOffice.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0.4, and a lot more - 230 new features, according to the openSUSE News!
For my own use, I was pleased to find that Adobe Flash is included in the Live CD distribution, Sun Java, Mozilla Thunderbird and Opera could be easily installed through the YaST software manager, and Gizmo5 was easy to download and install.
I obviously haven't had the time to test this release very much yet, but I will be doing so starting now. Based on what I have seen so far, I am quite impressed with this release.
One other thing... when I got to the office this morning, and booted the S6510 (which I had installed openSuSE on last night), instead of the usual green startup screen I got a very cute little winter scene, with penguins running around the edges of the GRUB boot menu. I have since rebooted a couple of times, and didn't get that GRUB menu again. Odd, interesting, amusing... it will be fun to see where that is coming from.
jw 19/12/2008
PreviousComments on this post
Update: Found it! (the Winter Penguin splash screen)
It turns out that the GRUB gfxmenu is actually a cpio archive, which contains a number of interesting things, such as graphic files that can be displayed, and a config file that controls what is displayed, where and when. In that config file you can define an alternate splash screen, and a percentage value that specifies how often it should be displayed. Very cute.
I never cease to be amazed at the things that I stumble across in Linux...
jw
